


My Tormenter, My Love

by WingedAria



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-03-30
Updated: 2020-06-13
Packaged: 2021-03-01 02:42:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,109
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23397943
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/WingedAria/pseuds/WingedAria
Summary: A Reylo post-TROS fic from two perspectives. If Exegol wasn’t the end for the dyad, then they must find a way forward with no guidance from the Jedi or the Sith.Title is from a poem by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, “Be Near Me.”
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 4





	1. Chapter 1

Rey stared in disbelief at the place where his body had been. The sweater he had worn crumpled into the dust, still warm under her hand. She clutched at it and her fingers slipped into the hole her lightsaber had made. Earlier that very day, she’d wanted him dead, and now he was. The ground shook, and more pieces of the Sith temple rained down on her. She could still taste their kiss, soft and sweet under the grit of the ruins. Reaching out, she called the lightsabers to her, wrapped them in the sweater, and fled. 

* * *

The pain was the first indication that something had gone wrong. Specifically, the absence of it. Maybe it hadn’t worked, and there had been no way off that rock for either of them. So perhaps this was death. That would explain the dark, and the painlessness, and the lightness of his body. He closed his eyes again, although it made no difference against the all-consuming darkness, and tuned in to his other senses. Faintly, but from all directions, he could hear deep, peaceful breathing. He matched his breathing with it, and realized he hadn’t needed to breathe before that. The surface around him was neither cool nor warm, and was utterly without texture. He tried to rise, but the floor offered no resistance and he couldn’t get to his feet. Vertigo overcame him and he curled into himself, his own body the only certain reference in the blackness. 

From behind his shoulder he saw a sudden surge of green light, and looked up with startled hope. Anything would be better than this formless nothing surrounding him. Looking down on him was a face he knew, someone he trusted. The face contorted in fear and anger, and the glowing blade swung down at him. He reached up to protect himself and found a weapon in his own hand. In all the darkness were these two bright blades of light, and a face that hated him. He pulled, willing the dark back down, and it obliged. 

* * *

The terror of the dream woke her. She sat up on the narrow medical cot, gripping the sheet tightly in both hands. All around, she could hear the hums and beeps of machinery, the bubble of bacta tanks, and the murmur of distant conversations. Rey relaxed back onto the thin mattress and counted out her breaths. She’d had the same vision every time she closed her eyes since leaving Exegol. The Jedi voices had vanished with the former Emperor, leaving her alone with nightmares and no guidance. Leia was gone, and there was no one who could replace her. Ben’s body had faded into the Force: he was at peace, leaving her alone with these memories.

Thinking of him was confusing, and painful. She felt his absence in the Force like a wound, aching each time she reached out. It was true, what the former Emperor had realized nearly too late: they had been a dyad, and alone, she was weaker. Rey closed her eyes and opened her mind, seeking that lost connection. 

* * *

His eyes opened. The unfamiliar room was full of ambient light, bright and shadowless. Not dead, then. A medical droid of an ancient model stood nearby, but made no protest as he sat up. Outside the room, he could hear fuzzy loudspeaker broadcasts and hurrying feet. He lay back on the flimsy medical cot and closed his eyes. Slow breath in, and hold, and out. Slow breath in, and hold, and...out.

His arms remembered a weight, cradled against his chest. A dead weight. He had breathed slowly against the pain of his broken ribs, willing her to breathe too. He couldn’t bear to see her dark eyes so flat and still, so he closed his. Breathe out, in, hold. Then a resonance, a connection in the Force. The vulnerability he’d felt the first time he’d seen her flared back into being. Under the palm of his hand, she breathed again. Her dead, dull eyes brightened and he knew she would pull away from him, as she always did.

But this time she didn’t. She reached out to him, touched his cheek. He could feel the Force leaving him, and his vision grew dark around the edges, but she was there in the center, where he could still see, and it was worth it. He’d done what Vader never could: he’d saved someone he loved from dying. She pulled him close, strong again with his power, their power, and kissed him, and that’s when he knew it must have been a dream. 

He could feel his heart racing and forced himself to relax. Breathe in, hold, and out; and then the dark closed around him.

* * *

The sweater was crumpled at the bottom of her bag. She found that she couldn’t bear to look at it, once she returned from Exegol. Grit and dust from the temple ruins clung to the fabric. When she lifted it out, it still smelled faintly of sweat and blood, and of him. She hadn’t realized she knew his scent; they had spent so little time together. She unrolled Luke and Leia’s lightsabers onto her workbench, then sat with the sweater in her hands. An impossible idea hovered in the back of her mind, a way to repay the life he’d given her. The idea was rough, but if it had worked for Palpatine, there must be a way. 

The nightmares hadn’t stopped. She dreamed about his life, vivid and terrible memories she had no right to see. Often when she woke she felt his presence, as though he had just left the room; sometimes she thought she heard his voice. She found herself reaching out through their broken bond, craving the answering power. It felt like missing a climbing handhold, a vertiginous lurch where there should have been safety. 

Finn could feel her distress. On the night when she awoke with the bedding on fire, lightning still sparking at her fingertips, he was there in her doorway. He and Artoo helped extinguish the flames, and then they walked out into the cool dawn. 

She still wasn’t used to the lush forest planet. Each morning it took her by surprise. Birds sang from the trees as the sun rose, and dew sparkled along the moss on the forest floor. Part of her still expected to wake up to the heat and empty monotony of Jakku, endless sand dunes and desperation. She walked along with Finn, listening to the planet waking up around them. 

“Gonna tell me what that was about?” Finn asked mildly, after they had walked a good distance from the base. 

Rey couldn’t think of where to begin. _I’m being haunted_ seemed dramatic, but she had just caught her room on fire. “I feel like I’ve lost control,” she said instead. “Since Exegol, things should be better. But they’re not. I don’t know what I’m supposed to do now.”

“We lost a lot of friends there,” Finn said. 

Rey nodded, watching the fallen leaves underfoot. He wouldn’t understand this particular loss. Kylo Ren had been the enemy, the Supreme Leader of the First Order. There was no reasonable explanation for what had happened between them. Nothing Finn would believe, or want to hear.

“You could talk to me,” Finn suggested softly. The forest brightened around them, gold light shining through the tree trunks. They sat together, leaning against a fallen log. Rey reached out to him through the Force. He took her hand, and she leaned her head on his shoulder. 

“Reach out,” she told Finn, remembering her first lesson. “With the Force. Tell me what you feel.” 

Finn tried to clear his mind, to think of something other than the woman sitting beside him. She wasn’t interested in him romantically, he knew that, and yet the hope was always there. He took a deep breath and concentrated on the Force. There was a spark of light in him, he imagined, closing his eyes. And in her, a more concentrated power, connecting her body to everything around it. A cold shadow traced its way along the edge of his consciousness, like a flicker in his peripheral vision. He tried to follow it back to a source, but it vanished. 

Rey sat up straight, putting some space between them. For a moment she stiffened, staring into the forest blindly. 

“What is it?” Finn asked, searching with his eyes and his new-found connection to the Force. He saw and felt nothing unusual, but when he looked at Rey he saw a tear on her cheek. She wiped it away roughly with the heel of her hand. 

“It’s nothing,” she said, still looking away. 

“You have to talk to someone, Rey. You’re not the only one who lost friends.” Finn took her hand again. “Tell me what happened to you on Exegol.”

“I can’t,” Rey said, meeting his eyes. “You wouldn’t understand.” 

When Poe had asked her to debrief, the morning after the battle ended, she had said the same thing. All she could tell them was that the former Emperor and Kylo Ren were dead, and the Sith temple destroyed. The Final Order had failed. 

“Please tell me,” Finn insisted. He reached out to her in the Force, feeling again that shadowy flicker of something other. “You don’t have to do this alone.”

“I am alone,” Rey whispered, so softly he wasn’t sure he heard it at all. 

* * *

“I know what I have to do, but I don’t know if I have the strength to do it. Will you help me?”

“Yes. Anything.”

The mask fell to the floor. He unclipped the saber from his belt and offered it, palms up, to his father. One hand, thick-knuckled with age, wrapped around the hilt. Ben reached out through the Force, watching his father’s face. Relief. Hope. And there it was: a tiny, traitorous undercurrent of fear. His father didn’t love him; he was afraid of him, afraid of his power. He had reason to be. The light faded as the last of the sun’s energy drained into the weaponized planet. Ben tightened his own grip on the saber, his father’s hand between his. 

_Stop me,_ a small voice begged in his mind. Seeking the light, even now. _Don’t let me do this._

He felt the fear rise in his father and saw the realization in his eyes. Many men had died on this blade before, and his father wouldn’t be the last. 

_Stop me._

The cross-bladed saber flared to life, his thumb on the switch. He felt the weight of his father’s body on the blade, shared his anguish and grief. Han reached out, hand shaking in agony, and touched his cheek. Neither man looked away until Kylo Ren thumbed the saber off. 

_No one can stop me now. It’s too late._

His father’s body tumbled away, off the walkway into the depths of the base. Far away someone was screaming, and he was distantly surprised to find it wasn’t him. His father’s death sent shockwaves through the Force, ripples of pain and loss that echoed back distantly from his mother, several systems away. He fell to one knee, the saber held loosely in his hand, and a laser blast struck him. The physical pain seared him upright, snarling. The girl, the traitor, and Chewbacca fled out of the station. He ignited the saber and followed them. A wall of fire billowed toward him as the station exploded. 

* * *

Rey dreamed that night about Han, felt him die again, and woke crying. The utter desolation she had felt in the dream followed her into waking. She sat up, closed her eyes, and breathed into the pain, allowing it to wash over and through her. Tears beaded on her eyelashes and trickled down her cheek. She could remember the feeling of Han’s hand there, cool fingers stroking her skin. Her arms ached with the remembered weight of his body, and she relaxed the muscles one by one, breathing peace into herself. These weren’t her memories.

Around her the walls of the _Millennium Falcon_ hummed with the familiar sound of the engines at cruise speed. Chewie was at the controls: she could hear him muttering to himself. Somewhere on the ship were Finn and BB-8. She breathed out and sent her thoughts out along the Force, feeling for the connection to her friends. 

_They don’t really know you. No one does. Except for me._ The deep, certain voice rose up unbidden in her mind, and she flinched. She opened her eyes and rose from the bed, raking her hair back into its usual three loops. 

_You’re dead,_ she thought angrily at the voice. _Leave me alone._

And of course there was no answer. 

* * *

The last thing he remembered was the hospital bay, but now, somehow, he was on a ship. The _Millennium Falcon_ , of all unlikely things. Chewbacca was in the copilot seat, relaxing with his arms behind his head. Ben sat up slowly, not looking forward to the prospect of an unarmed fight in the cockpit. But Chewie just roared briefly at him and turned his attention back to the flight instruments. Ben looked out the viewscreen at the stars streaking past, trying to collect his thoughts. 

There was a reflection in the viewscreen, one he would know anywhere: a pale face with dark hair and eyes, dressed all in white. He turned around and reached out to her, but the hand he extended wasn’t his own. The fingers were shorter, thinner, finer. A visceral horror welled up in his abdomen and he lurched to his feet. The wookie’s grumble after him sounded like a question, but he couldn’t answer. He found himself in an alcove with a gaming table and a semicircular bench, and he sank onto it gratefully. The unfamiliar hands in front of him shook where they rested on the table. For the first time since he awoke in the hospital bay, he looked himself over, and couldn’t control the panic. He fell into the tide of emotion and was gone. 

* * *

Rey stood up from the bench, confused. She’d been at the controls of the _Millennium Falcon_ only moments ago; she could hear Chewbacca calling after her. Her legs were shaking. She felt cold all over, and not just the chill of deep space. The dreams were getting stronger, and worse. Not for the first time in the past few months, she felt the immense weight of being the last Jedi. All those lives, experience, and power to call on, and yet she felt alone. She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, calming her heartbeat. BB-8 beeped questioningly from the corner, and she smiled at him. 

“I’m fine,” she lied, but her voice sounded sure, and the droid whirred a reply. “I just miss our friends.” 

She’d give anything to be able to talk this over with Master Skywalker. With either of them. But since they had spoken to her on Exegol, when the Jedi had destroyed the Sith forever, they’d been silent. Perhaps the Jedi were dead too, and now there was a different kind of balance. And a different kind of loneliness. She blinked away tears and saw Ben sitting across from her. He looked as he had when she left him on the wreck of the Death Star, both of them utterly broken by the loss of Leia. He watched her, tried to speak.

 _No_. Rey retreated to the cockpit. She couldn’t do this now. 

Chewbacca was willing to let her keep her silence, and they focused on flying, but she could feel his worried, dark eyes on her. They were returning to Ahch-to, where the first and last Jedi temple had stood. She intended to forge a new lightsaber. The work would center her, she hoped, and it would give them all some peace from the work of recreating the Republic. Maybe there, in a center of such old power, she would hear the Jedi again, and free herself of these painful memories. 

* * *

In the stacked stone hut, Rey could feel his presence. On this planet, where the Force was strong, the memories felt more real by the moment. As night fell, bringing the rain with it, she built a fire. She sat cross-legged, watching the light flicker on the newer stones where she had blasted a hole in the wall. As she had done then, she reached out with her feelings, searching for a connection. 

“Be with me,” she whispered, for the thousandth time since Exegol, and this time he was. 

A gentle blue light glowed around him. He was looking down at his empty hands where they rested on his knees, his dark hair hiding half his face. She met his eyes slowly, watching the blue light shimmer around him, as though he were a hologram. Or a ghost. His face softened and relaxed as their eyes met. His smile was pure delight and relief, and she remembered the last time he’d looked at her that way. 

* * *

He sat across from her, leaning over the fire to hold her hand. It was a good memory, and he supposed if this was death, it could be worse. He hadn’t anticipated an afterlife: Sith burned hot in life, and left no ghosts behind. Yet here he was, with her, listening to the rain on the stone roof, feeling the warmth of her fingers against his palm. She stared at him, and he could see her catch her breath. 

“You’re not alone,” he said softly. 

“What are you?” She asked, tracing his fingers with hers.

“You know,” he answered, meeting her eyes. She shook her head, but she didn’t look away. 

“You died on Exegol. I saw your body vanish, into the Force. After you...saved me.”

And all at once the pieces fell into place. He knew, and she knew, at the same moment.

“The sacrifice,” she whispered.

* * *

They forged the new saber together. It was the culmination of their unfinished Jedi training, weeks of labor shut in to the little stone hut. Outside, her friends waited, but inside it was just the two of them. While she slept, he would work, learning to use her body as his own. When she awoke, he was pulled again into the dark and the dreams. Every evening, she called to him, and they could be together. 

This kyber crystal was whole, perfect, and clear. Their power kept it balanced, hung waiting on a cord around her neck. She used the grip of her staff to form the hilt, worn and polished already from years of use. They cut the rest of the staff away, salvaging pieces for the ignition ring, end cap, and belt hook. 

“Be with me,” she whispered, the evening it was done, and he stood beside her. The saber was beautiful, and unique, lying finished and waiting on the worktable. She reached for it, but he stopped her. 

“There’s one more thing we need to do.”

* * *

If Jakku was truly nowhere, Tatooine was a close second. Chewbacca and Finn were bemused, but she didn’t have a good explanation to offer. They had muttered to one another, worried but accustomed to her strange impulses. The Force worked things out its own way, they knew, and so they trusted her. The  _ Millennium Falcon _ landed in the desert, near an abandoned group of buildings, half-buried in the sand. 

_ Here?  _ She asked Ben, in her mind, as she stepped out into the too-familiar grip of the desert heat. He didn’t have to answer: she could feel the echoes of all the lovely and terrible things that had happened here before. 

“Be with me,” she said aloud, willing Luke to appear here, in his old home. But as always, she was alone, except for Ben. 

The sand turned to powder underfoot, so she found a metal plate in the dunes and slid down into the homestead. Despite herself, she smiled. There had been few enough happy memories on Jakku, but that’s where she had learned her independence and strength. And here, in the Lars home, long abandoned, she could feel that there had been happiness and love. It looked exactly like Ben remembered it. Luke had brought him here, as a boy, on the way to the new Jedi temple. He’d told him stories of his own childhood, out here on the outer rim. Before everything had gone wrong between them, they had shared good moments here too.

Rey climbed out of the settlement, lightsabers swinging at her belt. She laid a cloth down on the hot sand. The scrap was coarsely woven, rusty brown, cut from a robe she’d found on the island of exile. She wrapped the lightsabers in it, tying them with a leather cord. It was right to leave them here, where no one would find them unless guided by the Force. Luke and Leia hadn’t left bodies behind to burn or to bury, but their lightsabers could rest together. 

Rey reached out for Ben, who was, as always, waiting behind her closed eyes. They laid her hand on the shrouded sabers and pushed them down, deep into the sand. By the time Rey opened her eyes, the wind had covered the place the sabers were buried, as if they’d never been there at all. 


	2. Chapter 2

The Kaminoan cloners were the best in the galaxy, because with the Sith gone, they were the only option. The facility, once bright and impeccably maintained, was streaked with algae on the outside. Several of the domed buildings on their high stalks above the waves were dark and abandoned, while others had broken and fallen into the sea. Rey landed Luke’s old x-wing on the sole remaining lighted platform. 

Artoo whistled from the back, a worried cooing sound. 

“I know what I’m doing, Artoo,” Rey said, and popped the canopy open. She jumped down, soaked to the skin in moments. No one waited to greet her on the platform, although she’d been given clearance to land. She pulled her hood up, trying unsuccessfully to shield her face from the driving rain, and hurried to the door. Artoo closed the canopy and rolled after her, still cooing to himself. 

The doors slid open onto a wide, rounded hallway. Rey absently touched the lightsaber hanging at her belt, and straightened the small pack she carried. A tall alien creature stalked toward her, draped in robes. 

“Welcome to Kamino,” it said in a calm, slow female voice. “Please, follow me.”

The hallway was inset with countless identical doors, all facing inward. The cloner said nothing as they walked. Rey followed her, listening to the murmur of the rain on the ceiling. Finally, the cloner pressed an access panel button with one impossibly long white finger. The door slid upward, revealing a once-elegant office. Another of the aliens waited behind a desk, but rose to offer Rey a seat. 

“It has been a long time since the Jedi sought us out,” the second alien said, the large dark eyes unreadable. “Please, sit.”

Rey did, holding her pack on her lap. 

“Now, what brings you to Kamino?” 

The interminable rain beat down on the domed buildings as she handed over the sweater Ben had worn when he died. The director examined it briefly, touching it as little as possible with her three-fingered hands. Rey waited impatiently.

“Is it enough? Can you do it?” She demanded after a moment. 

The narrow head on its long, elegant neck inclined to her. “We can try,” the director said, “but we make no guarantees.”

“Only one,” Rey instructed her. “And it should not be awake until I return.” 

The sweater disappeared with the cloner, into the maze of the facility. Rey watched the door shut with some misgivings. This was the only chance they had at getting him out of her head and back into life, and it was a long shot at best. If it failed, he would be lost. 

* * *

“You cannot be serious,” the first cloner hissed as soon as the door shut. “Last time we aided the Jedi, it was nearly the end of us.”

“There are no more Jedi,” the director said calmly. “But she is well-connected in this new Republic, and we cannot turn down a paying client.”

They walked along the circular corridor to the long-neglected cloning facilities. Empty classrooms built for hundreds testified to the power they’d once had, and had lost. Clones were expensive; under the Empire, conscripts were cheaper. And the Imperials had no convenient moral qualms about using natural-born soldiers for their endless war. 

“I suppose it can do no harm to see what she wants,” the first cloner murmured, opening the door and standing aside. The director nodded thoughtfully, sweeping past her into the processing center. 

Once, the room would have been staffed by a team of technicians, sequencing the samples and checking for errors, making the necessary edits. Now, the light flickered as the pair entered the empty room. The computer terminals came alive with a whirring sound beneath a layer of dust. The director brushed off the nearest terminal and leaned over it to provide her biometrics. Formalities complete, she snipped a sample from the black shirt the Jedi girl had given her. The fabric was stiff with old blood around several tears. She imagined, clinically, the damage those tears implied on the body beneath, and determined that the subject must have died in a matter of minutes. Likely a humanoid male, by the shape and size of the garment. She cut several more samples, to be safe, and placed them in separate vials of liquid. 

The centrifuge spun, the liquid did its work, and after only a few minutes the computer chimed. The sample was processed, and a match had been found in the database. So: criminal, military, or dignitary. Although the Kaminoan face was never particularly emotive, the cloner by the door saw the director stiffen in surprise. She hurried across the room. A dark-haired man was pictured on the computer screen with a brief but horrifying biography below. 

“What would a Jedi want with Kylo Ren?” The cloner whispered, bent over the terminal beside her supervisor.

The director blinked slowly, absorbing the result and calculating all its implications. 

“We cannot do this,” the cloner said. “Can we?”

* * *

Three weeks later, Rey stood in front of a small tube of pale blue liquid. Inside it was an embryo. She reached out to it through the Force, searching for a spark of life. The tiny body’s heart beat inside its translucent skin. 

_ Ben _ , she called, inside her mind, and he was there. She could feel his uncertainty, wavering between fear and hope. 

_ There is no one there yet, _ Rey assured him.  _ It’s too early.  _

_ I’m afraid,  _ he answered.  _ What if it doesn’t work? _

_ It was your plan,  _ Rey reminded him.  _ What other choice do we have? _

_ I don’t want to leave you.  _

Rey put her hand on the glass.  _ You know what you have to do, _ she told him, mimicking his deep voice, and he laughed. 

She closed her eyes and concentrated on the body in the cloning tube, imagining a wire connecting it with his spirit. After a moment’s hesitation, he joined her. The connection built slowly in their minds together, crystallizing around that first link. At the last instant, she felt him reach out for her, as though he had looked over his shoulder one last time. And then he was gone. The crystalline connection crumbled away, and the embryo felt no different. The tiny heart beat rapidly inside the blue liquid, but when she reached out to it she felt no response. 

Rey sank to the floor of the empty cloning room, palm pressed to the warm glass. Her eyes filled with tears and for the first time she let herself mourn him. No one was there to see. 

When the tears stopped, she stood and straightened her cloak. There was nothing to do now but to wait and hope. In the meantime, the galaxy needed her to be the last Jedi. 

* * *

“This is an unnecessary risk,” the cloner protested to the director. They stood inside the doorway watching as the Jedi girl took off in her vintage space fighter. “What good could possibly come of bringing him back?”

The director clasped her hands together, looking out through the rain at the glow of the fighter’s engines. “We’re not in the business of good or evil,” she answered after a moment. “We will have the favor of this supposed Jedi if she returns. If she does not, someone else will pay to have him. He was, until recently, the most powerful man in the galaxy.”

“Powerful,” the cloner muttered. “Murderous. Psychotic.”

The director turned her head slowly to regard the other cloner, huge eyes unreadable. “He will only be what we want him to be.”

Inside, the machines did their work. The clone embryo grew into an infant, then a child, and the cloners gave him their undivided attention. 


	3. Chapter 3

Ten years later:

He came up slowly into consciousness. The first thing he felt was the warm comfort of someone pressed against his back. A woman’s voice was murmuring, her breath on his neck. 

“Please wake up, Ben,” she was saying softly. “Please. I don’t want to be alone anymore.”

Ben. That wasn’t what they called him, but there was no one else she could be talking to. He frowned, and opened his eyes. The room was nearly empty, dim and quiet. The walls arched gently over them, and he could hear the incessant drumming of the rain. The woman pressed her forehead against his back. Her fist clenched the shirt he was wearing, pulling it tight against him. 

“I am so afraid you won’t wake up,” she whispered.

He laid his hand over hers on his side and squeezed her fingers gently. Her chest hitched against him and he couldn’t tell if it was a gasp or a sob or a laugh. She pulled, rolling him over onto his back, looking down at his face. 

“I thought I’d lost you,” she whispered. Her hair fell gently around her face and he pushed it back, stroking her cheek with his thumb. Her face was strangely familiar, although her cheekbones showed more sharply through the soft skin, and fine lines creased the corners of her eyes as she smiled down at him. 

“I’m here,” he whispered back. And when she kissed him, for a moment, nothing else mattered. 

As she pulled back, he had a flash of memory, too quick to lock down any details. They had kissed before; he knew her, but it felt like a dream. 

“What’s wrong?” He asked. The woman had gone still, staring at him, one hand on his chest. His heart raced under her palm.

“You’re not you,” she said, seeming to realize as she said it that it made no sense. “I mean, you’re not Ben, are you?”

“I don’t know,” he told her honestly, watching her emotions flicker across her face. She leaned away from him, looking horrified, but he held onto her hand. “Please don’t leave,” he said quietly. 

“I can’t feel you, in the Force,” she said, sounding as if she were about to cry. “There’s nothing. I’m sorry, I can’t do this right now.” She stood, pulling her hand from his, and nearly ran from the room. 

He sat up, looking after her as the door slammed back down. 

The woman didn’t come back for the rest of the day. He went about his usual routine of exercise and studying, but couldn’t get her face out of his mind. There had to be a reason she felt so familiar. He searched the computer database, but without her name he couldn’t get very far. 

“She’s the one who had you made,” the cloner had replied in her usual slow, even cadence, as though that were answer enough. 

The woman knocked on his door the following afternoon. The access panel didn’t have a lock, so the door slid open. He had just finished a run around the inner ring of the compound, and was wiping sweat from his face with his shirt. 

“I’m sorry, I can come back later,” she said, pausing on the threshold and averting her eyes from his bare chest. 

“No, I’m not busy,” he said. “Come in.”

Another fleeting memory: she’d walked in on him like this before. But of course that was impossible. He’d lived his whole life here on Kamino.

The woman hesitated. He pulled on a clean shirt. 

“Or we could walk,” he suggested. She nodded, and he followed her out into the hallway. It curved endlessly in both directions, seemingly without any variation, but he knew the facility perfectly. “Dining hall is this way, if you’re hungry, or -“

“That’s fine,” she interrupted, still not looking at him. They walked in silence for a minute. 

“What do I call you?” She asked finally. 

“They call me Solo, because I’m the only one here,” he said, and laughed. The woman paused, falling behind him, so he stopped and turned.

“I can’t call you that,” she snapped, face gone pale under the shadowless lights. 

“Call me what you like,” he said, taken aback. “It’s only a joke. There used to be lots of clones here. Now there’s just me.”

The woman breathed out shakily and they started walking again. 

“I’m Rey,” she said, when they sat down at one of the long tables in the dining hall. A droid brought food for both of them. 

_ Rey. _ The name resonated in his ears and his pulse quickened. Foreign memories flitted through his mind’s eye, too many and too fast to process. He looked down at his food instead, hoping his confusion didn’t show on his face. This woman had him made for a reason, and had waited years to come get him personally. He wasn’t a soldier, like the old clones had been. His training had been more general, and a bit haphazard. The cloners never told him who he was supposed to be, and the computers refused to bring up any information on his original host.

“How long have you been here?” Rey asked. 

He’d been coached on this one by the cloners. “Just the past two days,” he lied. “I don’t remember anything before that.”

She frowned at him, toying with her food. “You’re not a very good liar.”

“No,” he agreed easily. 

“So what do you remember?”

_ You, for some reason, _ he thought. Aloud he asked instead, “What do you want from me?”

“I don’t know,” she said, searching his face. “What do you want?”

He shook his head. “That doesn’t matter.”

“Of course it does,” Rey said. “We are who we choose to be.”

“I’m sorry I’m not who you wanted.”

For some reason, she smiled at him then. “We’ll see.”

That night, he dreamed of her. They fought together, back to back in a red room. When he woke in the middle of the night, his hands hummed with the vibrations of the lightsaber. He rose from the bed and took a fighting stance. With his eyes closed, he stepped slowly through the movements of the battle in his dream. The strikes and blocks flowed easily, one into the next. The last imagined opponent had been behind him, and when it was finished he lowered his arms and opened his eyes. The woman stood in his doorway, watching. 

“Did they teach you that?”

“No,” he said, confused. “I don’t know.”

Rey took her lightsaber off her belt. His hand raised on its own to take it, and he pulled back, but she didn’t seem to mind. 

She twisted a metal ring on the hilt, and the yellow blade glowed to life with a familiar hum and crackle. He saw joy, pain, and hope in the light it cast on her face. 

“Meet me tomorrow morning,” she said. “I’ll show you more.”

The door shut behind her, but he couldn’t get back to sleep. He practiced the movements over and over. Something waited like a forgotten word on the tip of his tongue. There were answers, and he would find them. 

Outside in the hall, Rey hooked her saber back onto her belt and leaned against the wall. The metal was cool on her back as she slid down to sit on the floor. She had dreamed of their battle against the Sith guards. When she woke, she found the clone tracing their steps, and for just an instant felt Ben’s presence again in the Force. It was enough.


End file.
